Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'Some Corner of an English Field,' The Second Novel of Dannie Abse Dannie Abse is a young poet and physician who was born in Wales and now lives and practices...
...The mildly disillusioned irony that seems to be Mr...
...But the chaos that was Marion's and Paul's and Michael's was a particularly demoralizing wilderness...
...Abse presents Henderson's dilemma in these terms: "Somewhere there was a way between utter acceptance and complete, destructive rebellion...
...Abse's story that Henderson almost completes his period of service without coming into direct conflict with the world he has in his heart rejected...
...His new book, Some Corner of an English Field (Criterion, $3.00), is rather untidily organized, but there is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end...
...What he wants is reasonable, but for reasons ironically developed by Mr...
...The situation is complicated by the fact that Wood, who knows he is not much of a doctor, depends heavily on Henderson...
...By comparison with many of his contemporaries, both English and American, he strikes me as an inept novelist...
...But because of the transfer he is called upon to speak at the officers' mess, and because of a little too much sherry, he says what he really thinks...
...Henderson is a pretty ordinary fellow, weak enough to be drawn into an affair with Sarah but kind-hearted enough to try not to hurt her...
...The CO does take decisive action, transferring Henderson to another base, but before he can make his departure the situation has worked itself out to a tragic conclusion...
...In both books one feels an essential honesty, a determination not to be betrayed into falseness by the desire to achieve certain literary effects...
...Abse's characteristic note is suggested by the titles of both books...
...His own impatience with convention draws him to Marion Stewart, but he soon sees that her extreme bohemianism is not for him...
...But suddenly a malicious busybody forces both Tom Wood and the commanding officer of the base to take a stand...
...On the contrary, the affair with Sarah, which no longer has any importance for Henderson, is what determines his fate...
...His first book of prose, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, which I reviewed in The New Leader for March 14, 1955, is not so much a novel as a collection of sketches, a series of scenes from the life of a Jewish boy in Wales...
...Abse his path becomes a difficult one...
...Why, the RAF was only a bourgeois society in extremis...
...Abse has his own way of looking at things, and, whatever his shortcomings as a novelist, he knows how to make us see what he sees...
...Chiefly as a result of his boredom, he has become involved in an affair with the wife of his superior officer, Tom Wood...
...It is part of the irony of Mr...
...Henderson wants to end the affair, but he is loath to hurt Sarah Wood, and he repeatedly postpones decisive action...
...He is too sensible to adopt the way of "complete, destructive rebellion," and too much of a person to be capable of "utter acceptance...
...The affair, though much talked about, has not been an open scandal...
...The second twists a line from Rupert Brooke's famous sonnet: "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England...
...But here, as in Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, he creates an atmosphere, and here he has brought to life a complex character...
...But if the rejection of Marion is an important stage in Henderson's development, it is not the crux of the story...
...Thus he experiences the senseless fury of the outraged insiders...
...Tom, who has hitherto been quite willing to shut his eyes, becomes utterly miserable when he has to take cognizance of the affair and do something about it...
...The English field is a small RAF base in the period after World War II, and the principal character is Andrew Henderson, a young doctor who has been drafted into the service and sent to the base as junior medical officer...
...He had become the Outsider who couldn't assent to the crowd's values, to the orthodox patterns of order, hierarchy and ritual...
...Meanwhile he has become interested in a girl who is completely indifferent to the conventions and moral standards of society...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'Some Corner of an English Field,' The Second Novel of Dannie Abse Dannie Abse is a young poet and physician who was born in Wales and now lives and practices medicine in London...
...Abse has drawn a picture of an Outsider, but without any of Colin Wilson's metaphysical melodrama...
...The first is a paraphrase of a line from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash burnt roses leave...
...Abse tells the story in a rather offhand fashion, so that it takes some time for the reader to discover where he is going, and he devotes more attention to minor characters than seems necessary...
...It had the odor of nothing...
...Henderson, when we meet him, is in the second and last year of military duty, and is bored with the whole business...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 4
